It cannot be denied that the Irish people were in this matter as
unstable as they were swift in their judgments, so that their actions
are really not of much account. Five years before they had received
the adventurer Lambert Simnel as their king, and he had been crowned
at Dublin. In any case the allegations of Warbeck’s supporters did
not march with established facts of gynecology. The murdered Duke of
York was born in 1472, and, as not twenty years elapsed between this
period and Warbeck’s appearance in Ireland, there was not time in the
ordinary process of nature, for father and son to have arrived at
such a quality of manhood that the latter was able to appear as full
grown. Even allowing for an unusual swiftness of growth common sense
evidently rebelled at this, and in 1492 Perkin Warbeck was received in
his final semblance of the Duke of York, himself younger son of Edward
IV. Many things were possible at a period when the difficulties of
voyage and travel made even small distances insuperable. At the end of
the fifteenth century Ireland was still so far removed from England
that even Warbeck’s Irish successes, emphasised though they were by the
Earls of Desmond and Kildare and a numerous body of supporters, were
unknown in England till considerably later. This is not strange if one
will consider that not until centuries later was there a regular postal
system, and that nearly two centuries later the Lord Chief Justice
Sir Matthew Hale, who was a firm believer in witchcraft, would have
condemned such a thing as telegraphy as an invention of the Devil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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